Performance Issues of MySQL with Python

[Andy Dustman]

Well, it does more than that. It converts each column from a string
(because MySQL returns all columns as strings) into the appropriate
Python type. Then you were converting all the Python types back into
strings. So it's no mystery that using the command line client is
faster, since it would take the string results and write them out
directly. (I assume it does this; there's no rational reason for it to
do otherwise.)